


dangerous liaisons

by Rhi



Category: Spooks
Genre: Coercion, Hatesex, M/M, Mind Games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-30
Updated: 2010-01-30
Packaged: 2017-10-06 21:00:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhi/pseuds/Rhi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deception is a hard habit to break. Tom Quinn hasn't bothered.</p><p>(Porn Battle IX prompt: Spooks, Tom Quinn/Adam Carter, wait)</p>
            </blockquote>





	dangerous liaisons

It had not been an organic meeting, this--at best, Five were shadows, and that was before the DG's policy that insisted those who had taken early retirement were to be MOPs, full stop. Tom's exit interview had made his role in it explicitly clear, that he was just as responsible for avoiding looks of recognition, greetings, pleased handshakes, or in some cases upper cuts to the jaw.

Fuck that.

He and Christine had taken the Bollywood director's contract under advisement. Her latest film featured some concepts that were generally disapproved of by certain parties, and being out of the country meant that she was an easy target for the usual looks-like-a-tragic-accident sort of thing. Not simple, but not a problem either, for Gita was an charming person, the people she'd brought from Mumbai were competent, and her problems were fairly easy to manage within legal bounds. Mostly.

If only his own problems were that simple. Last he'd known, Section D didn't show up at arts fundraising receptions without a reason, and since this was work, like hell he was going to stick to the you-are-like-glass method. This was his client, and if they wanted some information from him, they could go through the proper channels or sort it themselves.

Though perhaps this was what he'd been waiting for. Really terribly convenient.

He met Adam Carter's eyes, saw the flash of irritation, ignored it, and wandered off to one of the nearby galleries. Leaning against one of the columns, he waited for Adam to flick off his comm and discreetly follow. Like hell he'd want the Grid listening in on this, and it almost, almost made Tom smile.

"Nice suit," he said, and took a sip of the Islay he'd been nursing most of the night. "Budget extending to Savile Row now?"

Adam didn't bite, expression placid. "On special occasions. What's this about?"

"Like you don't know? I could ask you the same."

"Gitanjali Rao. Her latest work."

"Considering it's a reception for her," Tom said obliquely, "that wouldn't be surprising."

"Christ, Tom," said Adam, rolling his eyes slightly, "all we need are some of the dailies that she's brought with her."

"Why?"

Adam looked at him, hands slightly open. "Can't say. Eyes only." He nonchalantly took half a sip of his own drink, which looked like a martini; Tom would have appreciated the intended irony, if he hadn't been such a fucking prick about it.

Instead, he pushed up off the pillar and turned to go, deciding to at least ante up. "Harry knows full well I won't sell out a client to the highest bidder. He knows who he can go to for that, and maybe being buggered up the arse for his pains."

"Clearly, Tessa's not working with Rao, Transatlantic is. Tom, it's a serious women's rights issue, affecting a large percentage of Britain's Indian diaspora--"

"Trying to get me to break contract, second go, appealing to my sense of justice. You do remember that I was trained in the same tactics, don't you? Next one's revenge, and if that doesn't work, threatening my mother."

"Tom."

The change in tone was enough to make Tom turn and actually look at him. Either he was being played, or Adam was at the end of his rope.

"You're the last chance with this. Inter-office politics are fucked, we cannot get it any other way without black ops or prostituting ourselves to the CIA. Either of those would be a death sentence for the Grid--we need the footage."

Blinking slowly, Tom processed it for a moment; he reached in his pocket and pulled out a business card, scribbled something on the back, and handed it to Adam. Adam whose face was different, more lines to it, not from scars.

Tom had seen the obituary. He wasn't that thick.

"Three hours," he said. "If you want this, no comms, no Special Forces backup, because I swear to god, it's straight private negotiation. Five can take my reputation and Christine's as collateral."

Adam looked at him for a moment, looked down at the slip of cardstock, then looked back up again. He nodded.

Tom went back to join the party.

\------

The hotel was actually one he'd used before, only a few times. Anonymous. Not too cheap, not too expensive, and he'd done favours for more than one of the managers in terms of wrangling with the Home Office. Very quiet.

Tom knew better than to expect that Adam keep his word, of course; his reputation preceded him, and he'd seen enough dossiers where Adam or Fiona Carter or both had played on four different levels at the same time. Tom himself preferred to keep it to three; overcomplicating the mix was really unnecessary for the most part.

Asking Adam to turn off the comm was less for his own benefit, anyway. Tom didn't give a shite who knew what his tactics were, and Harry would probably approve, in the long run. Harry would probably laugh.

He waited, feet up at the desk in the suite, bowtie undone, the picture of insouciance, until the knock came.

"It's open."

Adam came in, and Tom watched expressionlessly as he did the subtle checks--always look behind the door, clear the corners, the pure basics--before turning and shutting it. "The hard drive, right?"

Tom met his eyes, head cocked towards the box on the desk beside him. "Of course."

"What do you want, Tom?"

"You've been authorised to negotiate with me? Harry must want this very, very badly," Tom said, toying with the words, keeping himself just this side of arsehole. _And it must leave a hell of a taste in your mouth._

Adam nearly lost some composure; Tom could see his face just about starting to change. "We can't afford to play you on this. You'd see through it, anyhow, you were a talented officer--_what do you want_?"

Tom kicked down from the desk, slowly standing with hands in his pockets and wandered up to Adam, eyes on his. "You hear things, getting about," he said. "About what you get up to, nowadays. Hear that..." He leaned in, spoke in Adam's ear, "you're an absolutely brilliant fuck."

"You're not my type," Adam said, though Tom could hear that it was almost too quick a response.

"Probably not. But you have thought of it, haven't you?"

"Perhaps. Or maybe you're just flattering yourself."

"I'm shit at that, and you know it."

Adam shook his head, and the gentle almost-pity of it made Tom want to vomit. He knew it well. He'd been picturing it for nearly three years. "You're a better man than that, to cheat on your wife, to try to debase me for revenge."

Tom sighed slowly, then moved back and sat on the edge of the bed, kicking off his shoes. "How far would you go to get this information, Adam? That's what I want. I want to know, firsthand, where's your limit? You know mine, I want to know yours."

Adam's gaze flicked momentarily to the hard drive before it moved back to Tom. Without a word, he sat down beside him and took off his own shoes and socks. "You're married, Tom."

"We have an understanding. She's probably in bed with the Lithuanian ambassador's wife, actually."

Snorting, Adam reached over and pulled the undone tie from around Tom's neck, the friction of fabric leaving it warm for a moment. "Take off your clothes."

\------

The process, of course, sped up as things grew more tense. Less talk, more action, getting to the point where fabric nearly tore against metal in a need to get fingers onto skin. Getting there was easier than Tom had anticipated, and he made a low noise in his throat as Adam pushed him down to the bed, moved in for a kiss.

It was deep and wet and angry, and Tom met it with his own fury, fingers reaching upwards to mesh in short blond hair even as their legs tangled in nearly the same way and their hips met all too neatly, cocks separated only by the bareness of cotton. Adam hissed a curse and Tom couldn't help but laugh, sardonic, needing to make him do it again. He rolled his hips upwards, slid his free hand down under the offending pants to grasp Adam's arse.

Another curse, more creative. Tom mentally added it to his score before he pulled his hand away. "You'd think you'd never been with a man before," he noted, and rolled them over before Adam could process that he was doing it and stop him. He spread wide the long fingers of one hand over Adam's chest to hold him down.

"Don't be an idiot." Adam, looking irritated, did had enough room to move his hand, enough to get Tom's pants down, which was quite welcome.

"Oh right, forgot you did your time at the old boys club. You know, most people wouldn't admit to taking it up the bum."

"Neither of us is most people, don't you think?" asked Adam, and roughly pulled Tom off him, enough to relieve them of the remains of boxers and briefs, before pulling him back, hard enough to bruise. Tom bent down, yanking Adam's head back to bite under his jaw, but he didn't get far before Adam responded by wrapping his hand around Tom's cock, more gently than he'd anticipated. Fingers settled into a firm grasp, thumb stroking hard up the back line before settling in at the head, tracing slightly in the slickness.

"No," Tom hissed, "no, definitely not."

\------

They didn't say much more from there, and Tom would remember it without words anyhow--with the way their bodies met, with the way Adam gasped when Tom's fingers first slid inside him, with the slight marks from close trimmed nails grazed into his back, with the heat and weight of cock in his hand beneath him.

It took everything he had not to nearly come with the first few thrusts, rough with the need of it and with the loathing (for Adam or himself, he didn't know). Even so, Adam met him each time, begged for more with a hoarse voice each time Tom moved just the right way inside him, until he wasn't begging anymore, simply biting into Tom's shoulder hard enough to break the skin.

It was hard to tell if Adam was just obliging, could read Tom's mind and knew he wanted him to come first, wanted that satisfaction of knowing he'd brought him off. By that point it didn't matter, because the clench and drag around his cock from the orgasm was enough to push him dangerously close, and the pain was even better from Adam's teeth near his neck.

He came, fast and hard and breathless, gasping with a brief cry that he quickly silenced despite Adam's low growl of encouragement, before they seemed to fall back down into reality. Reality was dim light in Kensington, three in the morning, ache in his back, the smell of lube and semen, a slight tang of blood on Adam's tongue before he pulled away from one more violent kiss.

Tom let him go, let Adam clean himself up and put on trousers while he watched, insolently naked still on the bed as if to remind him. He saw something in the other man's face shift, back to business, something he knew all too well.

"This is mine, then," said Adam, only looking at Tom above the shoulders as he picked up the hard drive off the desk.

"It's all there," Tom replied.

Adam nodded, slipping on his jacket and shoes, still slightly reticent. "You sure we're even," he said, and Tom cut off his own irritation. Really, couldn't blame him for that, either, considering some people and debts.

"We're sorted," he said, looking him in the eye. "Fair exchange."

Still dubious, and frankly seeming like he didn't know what the fuck had just happened, Adam nodded. "Take care of yourself, Tom," he said, after a long moment of consideration, as if he didn't believe Tom actually would, as if Tom was falling apart, and slipped out of the room.

Five minutes, and Tom got up. Ten and he'd swept the room and his clothes for bugs. Forty-five and he was showered and at home, drinking coffee and eating biscuits.

"Gita said to tell you that 'your friend is cute'. I get the feeling she likes to play it dangerous; she ended up flirting with Leanne Hill from the High Commissioner's office."

"In front of her wife? A bit overt of her."

Christine shrugged and dunked a HobNob. "I don't think she does anything by halves, to be honest."

Tom shrugged. "She was almost gleeful when I came round to make the copies. Almost too glad to help, but maybe that's more of the living dangerously thing."

"Cut her some slack, she's an MOP. Saving the world is new and exciting. Tom--do you think he'll tell Harry?"

"What, that I successfully fooled him? Not bloody likely. That I shagged him in the process? Definitely not. That'd be a terrible violation of decom contact rules."

"You're glowing, you know that?" Christine rolled her eyes, but she looked fondly at him. "So you got what you wanted, you beat Adam Carter--got anything left for me after all of that, or did he cock-block me again?"

"Never could sleep after an op," said Tom, and grinned.

**Author's Note:**

> Despite this being sort of unnatural in terms of pairing, I tried to make it fit into a canon frame as best I could. A few pointers:
> 
> \- This story takes place sometime in 2007; Fiona is dead, which I tried to make quietly obvious in various places.
> 
> \- Tom and Christine's marriage and security business are semi-canonical and stem from the Personnel Files/Harry's Diary books.
> 
> \- Five going begging to a private agency when in dire political straits is nothing new, as Tom was sent begging to Tessa in 2x02.
> 
> \- The scene in the rain that Tom mentally refers to is the climax of 3z02. Adam's curtness and utter refusal to understand Tom's POV, in contrast to that of Danny and Zoe, and even to some extent Harry, haunted me. Therefore, this idea of not-really-revenge had been brewing for a while before I got anywhere near the Porn Battle prompt; Tom simply needed to surpass Adam in some way, to overcome Adam's superiority.  
> If the way he did it is a bit problematic...even white hats are dingy on Spooks.
> 
> Incidentally, thanks to [Reg](http://archiveofourown.org/users/regimusprime/) for not kicking my ass for writing this, and to [eudaimon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon) for providing over a year of reasons for me to humanise Adam.


End file.
